They say that mimicry is the highest form of flattery. I wonder if that applies when a popular T.V. show, like "Law and Order: SVU" makes an episode based on your crimes, the way they did mine.
The episode I'm referring to was actually a rare two-parter, though only the first part (an entire episode) was dedicated to making a monster out of me so the SVU heroes could come to the rescue and save the little girl in the end. The second part (episode) was all about the aftermath caused in the first part.
Police fantasy shows like "Law and Order" are known to take their stories' ideas from real-life crime. But, of course, they rewrite the story to fit the theme of the show (i.e. "good guys" vs. "bad guys"), and suit the main characters' location. In my case, they made the semi-rural home that I invaded into an inner-city apartment, the kidnapped children's older brother (found murdered in the home) became an older sister, and instead of a loose pet dog alerting the neighbor that something was awry it was a loose pet bird.
Despite all the changes they made to make my crime appear in the hero's domain, the crime itself, and the criminal, were clearly copied from the news. The family's home was surveyed and invaded by a "monster" that murdered the parents and teenage sibling solely in order to kidnap the younger children to keep for his sexual pleasure. The children, a boy and girl the same ages as the victims in my crimes, were then taken to a remote location (an abandoned warehouse in the city instead of a forest in Montana) and repeatedly raped, until one day they were spotted in public and the SVU heroes were called in to the rescue.
In the T.V. version of my crime, however, the boy was killed publicly in order to allow the man to escape (briefly) with the girl. And then the girl was rescued later after the heroes sleuthed out the secluded warehouse and killed the "monster".
It's not all the similarities to my crime (or crimes) that make this show interesting to me, it's the differences! Why, for example, did they choose a bird instead of two large dogs as pets for the victim family? Perhaps because large dogs would have made the "monster" appear bold, instead of cowardly and weak. And why did they depict the man as someone who uncontrollably lusts after sex with children? That is something I have never done. I have no problem at all controlling my sexual behavior and never have --- very few so-called "sex offenders" ever do, despite the "myth" made popular by shows like this. In the SVU fantasy world, the man is shown bragging about his many victims in video tapes from his "treatment" days. I, of course, had many "victims" too, if you count all the older children who satisfied their own sexual curiosity at my expense when I was a child as my "victims", the way the popular news agencies reported after my arrest.
The news reports were based on supposedly confidential records from my own days in "treatment". But, I never bragged about my crimes, or glorified them in any way. And yet in the T.V. story, the man is depicted as a "monster" with only one craving: to rape and torture children.
In fact, in the final scenes (of the part-one episode) while the "monster"/man is holding a knife (or gun, or something, I can't really remember) to the head of one of our "heroes", he starts to rant about how much he enjoys raping children. It is precisely scenes like that that really make me question the mentality of the people who watch this crap, not to mention the people who write and produce it! "Monsters" like that simply can't, and don't, exist in the real world. Psychologists have known for a long time (though it seems even entire factions of them have somehow forgotten this fact) that sex crimes are almost never about sex. They are about power and control over some perceived source of pain and suffering that is pathologically associated with sex. So how in the world can so many people still find sex-fiend monsters so believable? It's like believing in sea monsters (which is actually a better analogy than it might seem at first, at least from a sociological and historical perspective).
It reminds me of a show that I see sometimes on the Mexican channel (Galavision) called "La Rosa de Guadalupe", in which problems are miraculously resolved after someone prays to the Virgin Mary for help. The only difference is that the "hero" is Guadalupe (the Spirit of the Virgin Mary) instead of an SVU police squad. In both shows the "heroes" and the "villains" are pathologically unrealistic. And both shows have a devoted fan-base made up of "true believers".
[J.D. March 3, 2015]
